Breaking Kristol

As a single cloud at sea can augur a typhoon, so can a short and superficially amiable piece by conservative intellectual godhead William Kristol in The Weekly Standard describe a coming right-wing line of attack against liberals that will thunder across the airwaves and op-ed pages for months, probably right up through November 2004. So buckle up, folks, because Kristol, for the April 7 Standard, has just written such a piece.

It is a house -- no, a skyscraper -- of propaganda and lies.

American liberalism faces a crisis, according to Kristol, because it sits on the cusp of one of its historic schisms, this time between "the Dick Gephardt liberals and the Dominique de Villepin left." The Gephardt liberals are the good guys here; they are pro-war, they understand the nefarious nature of the dragons out there that must be slain and they even earn the appellation "patriots." The Villepinistes -- well, you can imagine.

There is, obviously, objective truth in the fact that the party is split on the war. And there is a deeper problem than even Kristol describes, which is that the Democratic Party has no foreign policy (more on this later). But his firm command of the obvious is not what makes his column worth noting. It's the propagandistic ends to which the observation will be put.

Because, you see, opponents of the war -- all opponents of the war, no matter their reasoning or motivation -- are Villepinistes. And something worse: They are Wallaceites, as in Henry Wallace, the 1948 Progressive Labor Party presidential candidate, who was naive in the extreme about Joseph Stalin and whose campaign was rife with fellow travelers. Democrats and liberals who oppose the war in Iraq, Kristol suggests, are inheritors of this ignoble mantle, while those who back the war are the right and proper children of Harry Truman and the Democratic Cold Warriors of the late 1940s.

A seductive line of reasoning. Like much of what the right puts out, it sort of sounds logical -- logical enough not to be challenged by either timorous Democrats (is there any other kind now?) or mainstream journalists who don't know any better. And -- like much of what the right puts out -- it is Orwellian duplicity, straight out of the Oceania Ministry of Truth, known these days as the Murdoch Empire, in whose very fertile soil Kristol digs his spade.

It would certainly be news, for example, to George Kennan, arguably the most important and influential of the Cold Warriors. How do I know this? Because Kennan is still alive and kicking, nearing 100, and he gave an interview to The Hill last Sept. 25 in which he savaged the Bush administration and its perversion of his famous doctrines. Kennan told that newspaper's Albert Eisele the following: that an attack on Iraq would amount to a second war that "bears no relation to the first war against terrorism"; that the administration's attempts to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda were "pathetically unsupportive and unreliable"; that the United States can't "confront all the painful and dangerous situations that exist in the world"; and that the Democratic congressional acquiescence to Bush's war resolution, then fresh, was "a shabby and shameful reaction."

So if we are to believe Bill Kristol, Dick Gephardt is a Kennanite, but even George Kennan is not a Kennanite.

Kristol's take would be news, too, to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. No shrinking violet on Cold War matters, he helped found Americans for Democratic Action specifically to marginalize fellow travelers and soft-headed Stalin apologists from mainstream liberalism. But Schlesinger wrote in the Los Angeles Times on March 23: "The president has adopted a policy of 'anticipatory self-defense' that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy."

Is Schlesinger, then, a latter-day Wallaceite? No one was a more articulate critic of Wallace-like Soviet apologism in its day than Schlesinger. Pick up your copy of The Vital Center, Bill. Read Schlesinger's depiction of the Doughfaces, as he called the PLPers and their kin. It's between pages 42 and 48, depending on your edition. It rings with contempt -- and it is, incidentally, a spot-on description of today's Naderites, whom I assure you the vast majority of liberal opponents of the war apprehend with equal disrespect.

Propagandizing about the present cannot work without first lying about the past, and Kristol and others on the right accomplish this with an easy cynicism. They know that the very moniker "Cold Warrior" sounds hawkish, no-nonsense, America-first-like. This, too, is false. Cold Warriors were hawks, but of a self-questioning and deliberative sort. They were multilateralists who built the very organizations today's hawks are out to tear apart. Further, they understood that authority and power were two different things and that the former did not issue solely from the barrel of a gun. They knew that, just as in the old Westerns, unless the circumstance is absolutely dire and no alternative for survival exists, the good guy never shoots first. Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz -- and Kristol -- have nothing whatsoever to do with the old Cold Warriors. And while some opponents of this war are anti-American -- and, sure, silly in their arguments -- far, far more of us have legitimate concerns about the precedent this sets for other nations and the coming boomerang effect the administration's intentionally failed diplomacy (you read that right) will produce.

But legitimate debate means nothing to these people. Only partisan advantage does. The point is to scare the other side, club it into submission, and you do that by setting up a phony argument and repeating it over and over. And, tragically, it works. That's the fun thing about being in the Ministry of Truth: If you say it, it's true.

That's the propaganda part. Now for the lie.

In his last paragraph, Kristol writes that today's alleged Doughfaces are motivated chiefly by their hatred of George W. Bush. He writes that it is with sorrow that he recognizes the condition (oh, please!) because in the 1990s, "parts of the Republican Party, and of the conservative movement," were driven by hatred of Bill Clinton. Then we come to this sentence, and it is choice: "But this wing of the GOP and conservatism lost in an intra-party and intra-movement struggle, and has now been marginalized -- Pat Buchanan is no longer a Republican, and his magazine these days makes common cause with Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal."

First of all, what "intra-party and intra-movement struggle"? There may have been a few minor reassessments of the party's 1990s posture by a handful of people (let us hope by Kristol himself, who wrote in May of 1998 that Clinton "is doomed" and that Republicans would sweep the midterm elections by focusing on nothing but the president's louche ways). But mainly what happened is that their guy won -- hijacked -- the White House, so they didn't have anyone in power to hate anymore. Suppose that President Gore were in the White House, and suppose that his military had not captured Osama bin Laden after 18 months; or that anthrax had been mailed to Trent Lott and Jesse Helms' offices, and Gore's Justice Department, 17 months later, didn't even have a suspect! It's obvious to anyone with a mind that the Republicans, and Kristol, would be doing to Gore exactly what they did to Clinton in 1998.

But the most dishonest part of the paragraph comes after the dash. So Pat Buchanan led the crusades against Clinton, did he? Granted, Buchanan was no wallflower. But led the opposition? Hardly. Among pols the leader was Tom DeLay, who is still going strong and showing no visible signs of having reassessed anything. And who led the frantic Clinton-hating among writers? At this point, I turn to another for a contemporaneous account:

No conservative thinker has done more to advance this new moralism than William Kristol. . . . And no journal has done more to propagate, defend, and advance this version of conservatism than the magazine Kristol edits, The Weekly Standard. . . . Most of the year, Kristol and The Standard have gleefully egged on Republicans in their moral crusade. . . . (P)erhaps no edition of The Standard captured the current state of American conservatism better than the one that came out immediately after the Starr report was made public. Its cover portrayed Starr as Mark McGwire, with the headline: 'Starr's Home Run.' Inside, page after page of anti-Clinton coverage, anchored by an essay by Kristol advocating a full House vote for impeachment of the President within a month. . . .

Paul Krugman? Joe Conason? Guess again. That was Andrew Sullivan, in one of his rare lucid moments, in The New York Times Magazine for Oct. 11, 1998.

The import of the lie is not merely that Kristol today purports to disdain a posture he in fact endorsed full throttle when it mattered, dishonest though that is. Rather, the importance is the implication that, now that conservatives have thrown Pat overboard, they're sensible, reasonable people.

This much I concede: The Democrats need a foreign policy. They need one that opposes the ultra-hawks and their designs for empire but that also discards Vietnam-era distrust of American power as a potential instrument for good. They need one, in other words, that owes a greater intellectual debt to the likes of Kennan and Schlesinger than to Gene McCarthy; they should be making those historical links explicit in their rhetoric, and they should have been doing so for at least the past year. That they haven't shows not that they are all closet McGovernicks -- after all, even the Democratic hawks don't really have a foreign-policy vision, they just think it's a safer position from which to seek the presidency -- but that they lack imagination and are captive to pollsters who tell them no one even knows who Dean Acheson is anymore so why bother?

So, yes, that's a problem for liberalism. But it hardly means that anyone who questions the wisdom of this war is in league with the French and a hellspawn of Henry Wallace. (And speaking of Wallaces, is Lt. Gen. William Wallace, the commander of the ground forces in Iraq who earned conservative ire last week with candid remarks about the war strategy, part of this anti-American cabal as well? A conspiracy so immense . . .) But something tells me that won't prevent Kristol and his comrades from saying it, and saying it again, right up to election day 2004. Until Democrats learn how to define themselves, there will be nothing to prevent the Bill Kristols of the world from doing so for them.